Entitlement

Before I get into my post, I just have to share the good news. We're back in PGN! This happened much more quickly than I thought it would, so I'm happy!

Now about entitlement. One of the things I like to do during the difficult waiting period is read about adoption. I read parenting books and also memoirs and biographies. There are TONS of these books out there! I really like reading them because they reduce the seemingly endless process to a few hundred pages. It makes me feel that there is hope and Kit will be home soon!

Anyway, I was reading Two Little Girls: A Memoir of Adoption by Theresa Reid. I enjoyed the book, but there were some things that really bothered me. The main one was the author's sense of entitlement. I'm not talking about feeling entitled to raise and love your child, that is a necessary part of adoption. In this book, the author seemed to feel entitled to a child. She wrote as if the world owed her a child. And not just any child, a perfectly healthy little girl who looked just like her. She criticized her child's birth country and their adoption process. She seemed to feel that Ukraine should give her a child because they have children in need and she is a rich, successful American.

In my opinion, other countries do not owe Americans anything, least of all their most precious resource- children. We should feel privileged and lucky to be allowed to adopt a child from another country. As annoying and agonizing as the legal process can be, it is not our place to judge it. We are guests in this other country. They have the right to run their adoption process in the way they choose (if they have signed on to the Hague Treaty, they need to follow those guidelines but I don't want to get into that now).